Agenda Items

IP Attrition: Ideas on what we might be able to do?

There was considerable and spirited discussion on this topic. It seems
(from recent analysis by David Potter & Christopher Majka) that most IPs
(95%) on the CCN are aware of our graphical capabilities and so this is
not a major factor in terms of IPs migrating from our service (with some
exceptions).

A key area is developing methods (perhaps through an IP Loyalty Program
of the type suggested by Richard Rudnicki) of creating/solidifying a
relationship between the CCN and the IP organizations which goes beyond
the relationship we have with the IP Editors.

An important aspect of our service which we should/need to
stress/publicize further is our extensive support of mailing lists. We
need to try and convey to IPs the functionality and advantages of mailing
lists.

Technical representatives agreed to examine the possibility of creating
an in-house graphical URL statistics display/script, something which it
was felt would be easy to implement and attractive to some IPs.

It was noted that the Halifax Regional Library keeps an extensive
catalogue of clubs, groups and organizations in the HRM which would be a
good potential source of organizations who it would be worth approaching
viz-a-viz becoming Information Providers.

There was some discussion of how to actively recruit IPs to the CCN.
Some of this can, and indeed is, done by CCN-IP members on a sporadic
basis, however a wholesale campaign of this sort is really a function that
should be carried out by staff and is sufficient work that it is beyond a
purely voluntary capacity.

FTP to IP directories now up & running: Process &
Procedures.

Congratulations were extended to Michael Smith for his work in helping
to get this functionality up and running on the CCN, a feature which is of
definite and great interest to many IPs. Tests thus far indicate that it
is very simple to us, robust and works flawlessly. A great technical plus
is that the FTP 'put' function automatically generates and includes the
correct <link> elements and the RCS comment files, thus neatly
solving one
of the potentially problematic areas of FTP to IP directories.

Michael is still soliciting other volunteers to 'torture-test' it for
any bugs before the service come out of beta-test. Once this is done, the
intention is to implement it across the board automatically for all IPs
and IPEs to be able to take advantage of.

It will be necessary to create some documentation for this (which Chris
M. & Michael S. have volunteered to do) and thence to integrate this
aspect of functionality into IP Training.

CCN Welcome Page now up & running: Repercussions?

Congratulations were extended to David Potter on all his hard work in
getting this feature of the CCN Interface up and working. It is now fully
operational and working correctly. The degree to which various CCN groups
are taking advantage of its capabilities is still quite varied. All units
of the CCN should be encouraged to make the most of it so that it assumes
its full role as an important conduit of CCN information.

David Potter also discussed the future possibilities of using group
mail to convey messages to identifiable groups on the CCN through the
vehicle of the Welcome Page.

There was some discussion viz-a-viz how long it takes to load, however,
David Potter's monitoring scripts seem to indicate that it reliably does
so within 6-15 seconds. There was also some discussion on how users could
opt-out of the Welcome page to default to the Home Page, however, it was
decided not to emphasize this since the entire raison-d'etre of creating
the Welcome Page had been so that we could reliably communicate with CCN
members logging in to the system and convey certain information to them.
Thus to facilitate opting-out would be to shoot ourselves in the foot.

CCN Featured IP now up & running: Process, Procedures &
Consequences.

The Featured IP link is now up and running at http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Policy/messages/ip/docs-html/featured.html
and two IPs have thus far been in the rotation. It was noted that we
should endeavour to keep this information fresh so that the Featured IP
changes every two weeks or so. Chris M. has a couple of entries in the
queue and is waiting for copy from them. He will also shortly publicize
the feature to all-ips and solicit further entries.

Chris Majka noted that the Featured IP capability was palpably
achieving its purpose in that URL hits to the Law Reform Commission had
jumped enormously (perhaps five-fold!) in the interval after the link was
introduced. Some of this may be attributable to other sources however it
is very clear that a substantial number of people are actually following
the link and learning about a CCN IP. He also noted that he plans to
introduce some sort of simple icon that recipients can add to their
websites identifying them as such, giving a certain degree of cachet to
having been thus selected.

David Potter noted that we would look at the script to check to see
that this link was not appearing overly often in the Welcome Page
rotation.

There is now (as per Mark Rushton's suggestion) a web-based set of
links (from appropriate IP pages) to the Featured IP page, thus making
this resource accessible to our web-users and hence opening up the
possibility of adding logos and other graphic elements to the page.

CCN Site Map now up & running: Feedback? Further ideas?

The CCN site map is now up and running at http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/site_map.html.
Congratulations were extended to Christopher Majka in getting this
interface feature up and running. Mark Rushton had fixed a coding bug;
Tony Cianfaglione pointed out a spelling typo.

Various methods were discussed to further enhance the functionality of
this feature, including the possibility of javascript pop-ups to be able
to show more detail and to enlarge areas of the map so that the type was
not quite so small and hard to read.

Virtual Domains now up and running: Process, Procedures &
Costs.

There was considerable discussion of this topic, particularly the rate
structures that the Board of Directors is proposing to charge our
non-business IPs. The IP Committee was unanimous in its conviction
that a $400 annual fee was:

Not what its understanding ever had been for this rate structure.
It was rather its belief that this fee should be a one-time set-up charge;

That it was excessive and would put this feature out of the range
of the vast majority of our current Information Providers;

That it was out of keeping with what costs the CCN incurred in
implementing VDN's (i.e. the technical overhead in implementing this was
of a one-time nature: beyond that, maintaining a VDN was scarcely more
difficult than that any other IP).

A rate of $400 as a one-time set-up charge followed by a $100 annual
fee was floated as something which represented a much more realistic fee
for non-business IPs and which many felt was much more apt to be
'sell-able' to our IP constituency.

We have set up a few VDN's thus far, both in the *.ca domain and
through Internic, and the process, although having suffered a few
glitches, is slowly being solidified thanks to David Murdoch's yeoman
efforts. Congratulations to him and Kassiem Jacobs in getting the
technical and procedural aspects of this process working!

Warm congratulations were extended to David Potter who has solved a
long-standing IPDB bug, namely that of the non-creation of ml-pub lists.
As a result of his recent work with the IP Database scripts the creation
command is now correctly generating both ml-priv and ml-pub lists. Yea!

Still on the IP wish-list of things to be fixed viz-a-viz mailing lists
is a way to synchronize edit-group members with ml-priv lists members.
There was considerable discussion on this matter and David Potter
mentioned that some programming in this direction had already been done.
Worth investigating was a way in which the CRON would run a routine to
synchronize the membership of both groups. Exceptions to the one-to-one
equivalence of these are so infrequent that, as a general rule, it would
be worthwhile having a simple system to keep them in synch.

PPP Connectivity and Chebucto Plus: who's eligible.

The CCN's Portmaster and PP services are now up and running with
fourteen lines currently on the Portmaster. The service is running very
well and supports all aspects of HTTP, EMail, Usenet, Telnet and FTP
functionality.

The CCN is in the process of developing a 'Chebucto Plus' service for
members which will, initially be offered to our Sustaining Members as a
trial group. Based on the success of this the plan is then to extend the
service to our Supporting members.

Documentation and Support materials and services are in the process of
being developed and written, many of which are available as of this time.

The IP Committee continues to be interested in having the possibility
of extending these services, at least in some measure, as a benefit to IPs
and IPEs for their use in proofing their sites in graphical browsers.
Perhaps we could look at integrating this PPP service with our Chebucto IP
Premium package in the future?

Chebucto Beacon now up & running: Feedback? Ideas? viz. IP
area.

The Chebucto Beacon has been up and running for some time at http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Newsletter/Beacon/index.html.
Andrew Wright discussed the Beacon at some length. He noted that unless he
received more news submissions in the next couple of weeks he was going to
scrap the News section of the Beacon for lack of input.

Glen Euloth ab593@chebucto.ns.ca has been
writing articles on the IP sector for the Beacon and all CCN-IP members
are encouraged to contact him (and CC Andrew at au141@chebucto.ns.ca) with ideas
and/or information for articles.

In the somewhat limited time available there was preliminary discussion
on a number of topics pertaining to this area. Discussions centered on:

Managing large (and ever growing!) document families like the one
we have at the CCN in such a way as to maintain functional and stylistic
coherence. The role of Cascading Style Sheets was emphasized in this
regard and it was agreed to move to try and implement some of this
technology on a trial basis in the New Year. Chris M. agreed to work
towards developing a CSS template(s) which we could examine, debug, etc.
and then priorise some CCN pages to which it could be applied.

Having the Editors rethink what we are doing with our CCN IP
pages. Many of these are in dire need of overhaul, both stylistically and
in terms of content. They arose at an earlier era of the WWW before the
advent of search engines. We need to streamline and focus. Some areas are
sadly neglected.

Maintaining stylistic and functional coherence. All the help and
documentation materials we have available were singled out in this regard.
We have very extensive (and good!) materials available, however, they are
administered through a variety of methods, scattered, stylistically
disparate, and seldom adequately cross-referenced. If we want to offer a
more integrated and coherent set of help documents to our users we need to
move on integrating these. At the same time it was noted that doing so,
would be a very sizable undertaking.

It was pointed out that with the introduction of Chebucto Plus we
will soon be in a position where we can/could/should introduce, for the
benefit of our own members, much more visually sophisticated pages for use
on graphical browsers which can take advantage of javascript, tables,
frames, CSS and other HTML 4.0 features. At the same time it was noted
that doing so, would be a very sizable undertaking.

Both these latter areas highlight our increasing need to have some
funds to pay for such endeavors. We again are reaching the limits of what
volunteers can reasonably be expected to undertake.

Further discussion on this topic will take place at the next meeting.

CCN Communications Committee now up and running: Ideas for
collaboration?

Discussion of this item was postponed to the next meeting in the new
year.

In general the IP Committee underscored the fact that it was 'alive and
well and living' (and not in Paris!) and that rumours of its demise had,
in the words of Mark Twain, "been much exaggerated."